Archive for June, 2012

I find this recipe very useful. I know kale is REALLY good for me, and I find it frequently in my farm share at this time of year. To tell you the truth, however, I have a little trouble forcing myself to eat much of it. It’s just a bit too bitter, a bit too … kale-y.

Roasting it with olive oil and salt (I love salt) tones down the flavor a bit and makes it fun to eat.

The recipe (or a variant of it) was given to me several years ago by Margaret Fitzpatrick. Margaret lives in my hometown of Hawley, Massachusetts, and has owned a number of restaurants in our area over the years.

Margaret calls the dish “Kale Chips,” and I can see why; the pieces of kale are small and have a definite potato-chip-like crunch. I like the alliteration of “Crispy Kale,” however.

My friend Peter has been telling me for months that I would love the Queen of Cups Tea Room in Greenfield, Massachusetts. It takes me a while to get ANYWHERE, however, so I only recently managed to darken the Queen’s doorway.

As usual, Peter was right: I was enchanted by the food; by the shop’s owner, Becca Byram; and by the way the place looks

Decorative plates, cups, and teapots line the walls and the shelves. A leather chair sits in one corner waiting for a solitary tea drinker. Linen-covered tables welcome small groups of sippers. In the back of the shop a counter displays baked goods, particularly Becca’s beloved scones and cookies.

Becca has lived in the United States for almost 20 years. A musician from Worcestershire, England, she married an American and lived for many years in urban areas in this country.

Almost ten years ago she and her husband visited the home of his relatives in Deerfield, Massachusetts. They fell in love with New England, which resembles Becca’s native county. “It has the same kind of farms and the same kind of hillsides,” she told me with a smile on her face.

She and her husband had already started a family—they now have a ten year old and a seven year old—and decided they wanted to raise that family in the area.

As the children grew older and her musician husband continued to travel, Becca longed to find an occupation that would keep her near home and would make her available to her offspring in the evenings.

I love the decor at the Queen of Cups!

The Queen of Cups sprang from that desire—and from an observation Becca had made when friends and family visited from England. “I realized that there wasn’t anywhere within at least 40 miles where I could take them for a nice cup of tea,” she explained.

An avid baker like her mother and grandmother before her, she welcomed the opportunity to tie on her apron and bake goodies to accompany those nice cups of tea.

She told me that people often give her plates and cups to fill out the tea room. “They like to see their things displayed.”

When asked about the name of the tea room, Becca laughed. “I am a queen of cups because I have a massive collection of cups!”

She added that she adapted the Queen of Cups Tarot card for her logo. “The Queen of Cups in the card is holding a chalice. Mine is holding a teacup.”

I asked Becca who her customers are. “People who like tea shops LIKE tea shops,” she informed me, “and they will make pilgrimages to find them.”

She says she gets a lot of references from a site called TeaMap, which lists tea rooms by location. Her customers are looking for “tea in a teapot and brewed at the right temperature.”

I am not a tea drinker, alas, but I do love sweets. I convinced Becca to give me her recipe for Jammie Dodgers, the English equivalent of Linzer Tarts.

Along with the formula for the cookies Becca shared her philosophy about recipes: “Very often, bakers guard their recipes as if their very livelihood depended on it. Personally, I have found that many of the greatest recipes are free. This one came originally from the back of a Tate & Lyon sugar packet in England, found by my mother in 1972.

I have to be frank and tell you that when I made these cookies they were much less lovely than Becca’s creations. And the jam (I didn’t have raspberry so I used strawberry) got a bit runny. They tasted absolutely wonderful, however. The cornstarch in the recipe gives them a unique, delicate texture.

In a large bowl mix all ingredients (except the jam and final sugar!) until they come together in a soft ball.

Wrap the ball in waxed paper and refrigerate for 1 hour.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Remove the dough from its wrapping and place it on a lightly floured board. Whack it briefly with your rolling pin to start to loosen it up.

Roll the dough out until it is 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick. Be sure to turn the dough 45 degrees with each roll to keep it even. If your rolling pin starts getting sticky, it’s perfectly all right to use your hands to roll the dough instead.

Use your favorite cookie cutter to cut out shapes. (A the tea shop they use a heart-shaped cutter). Cut out a smaller shape in the center of half of the cookies.

Place the unbaked cookies on parchment-covered sheets. (I used my silicone baking mat.) They do not expand in the oven so they may be reasonably close together.

Bake the cookies (including the small cut-outs, which you may use for decorating pastry or just eat!) for five to ten minutes, or until they are lightly browned. “Keep your eye on them—they bake fast!” Becca Byram cautioned. “Don’t make a cup of coffee because it will take too long.”

Let the cookies sit on their pans above a cooling rack for 20 to 25 minutes before removing.

Just before serving cover the cookies that don’t have shapes cut out of them with a dab of jam; then cover the jam with the cut-out cookies so that the jam peeks through.

Dust with confectioner’s sugar and serve.

Makes about a dozen cookies (more or less, depending on the size of one’s cookie cutters).

I recently won a drawing–something that seldom happens to me! The prize was a book I had been coveting for some time, Rudolph Valentino: The Silent Idol by Donna Hill.

Valentino was born in 1895, the same year in which the Lumière brothers first showed films to the public. He is one of the few silent-film stars who is still remembered and recognized by much of the American public. A handsome Italian who wasn’t sure what his destiny would be but was sure he HAD a destiny, he came to the United States at the age of 18 and began his career as a dancer.

His dancing skills would help establish his stardom in his breakthrough film, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921). The dance scene in Four Horsemen started a national craze for the tango and is still breathtaking to watch. Valentino made several hugely successful films before dying of a perforated ulcer in 1926.

Donna Hill became a lifelong film fan when she was ten years old. She saw her first Valentino film, Blood and Sand, on her local PBS station shortly after that. She bought her first Valentino photograph in the mid-1970s when she was a teenager. She now owns hundreds of photographs of the star; she tells me that she hasn’t counted but thinks the collection numbers between 700 and 1000.

Her book, which came out in 2010, uses her collection to illustrate the life of Valentino. (Its subtitle is “His Life in Photographs.”) Other books have been written about the actor; in fact, Donna lists most of them on her Valentino website, called Falcon Lair after Valentino’s beloved house in Beverly Hills.

This one is unique in that it literally gives the reader a look at this much photographed icon, at work and at home.

Courtesy of Donna Hill

Donna Hill is my favorite kind of film scholar. She writes about film because she loves it. She will spend months following a tip that might give her just a little more information about long-lost artists and pieces of celluloid. She is currently at work on a biography of Dorothy Gish, the less well known (but in the eyes of many equally talented) sister of silent-film star Lillian Gish.

Donna has taken the nom d’internet “RudyFan.” She doesn’t let her adoration stand in the way of a little straight shooting when she talks about her idol, however. She says in the book:

Was Valentino a great actor? The answer is, under the right circumstances and with the right director, he could be. More often than not he was hampered by poor scenarios, lackluster direction, and cheap production values. But cinematic legacy is not necessarily a function of thespian craftsmanship. Rudolph Valentino was—indubitably—a star.http://tinkyweisblat.wordpress.com/2012/06/05/this-girls-notes-on-that-girl/

With Carrie Clark Ward in "The Eagle" (Courtesy of Donna Hill)

Donna’s book shows that stardom at work on the screen and in Valentino’s personal life. The photographs are stunning, and so is their subject. By the time the book gets to the actor’s untimely death at the age of 31, the reader has been drawn into Valentino’s world and mourns that death.

Naturally, as soon as I saw the book I wrote to Donna and asked for a recipe. She told me that Valentino loved seafood, having grown up in Puglia, a coastal region of Italy. “When times were lean [in his early days in Los Angeles], he went to the beach for shellfish,” she informed me. He also hunted small game to put food on the table when necessary.

His mother was French so he adored French as well as Italian food, Donna reported. And he loved preparing pasta for his friends. One special meal some of them remembered was a spicy dish of six-foot-long pasta with garlic, hot pepper, and olive oil.

Donna also sent me a version of the recipe below, which has been making the rounds of Rudy fans. She wasn’t 100 percent certain it was authentic, but its use of fish (anchovies!) as the “secret” ingredient seems right up Valentino’s alley. (They are secret because they disappear into the sauce, leaving only a hint of their haunting flavor.) Until I find six-foot-long spaghetti for the spicy sauce, this is my Rudy Recipe.

Heat 1 tablespoon of the oil in a Dutch oven and sauté the onion pieces and mushrooms over low heat until they soften, adding a little water if needed. Add the tomato sauce, the tomato paste, and the whole tomatoes. Continue to cook over low heat, partially covered.

In a separate skillet sauté the sausage pieces, adding the second tablespoon of oil if they start to stick. Add the garlic pieces as the sausage cooks. When the sausage has browned, scoop the pieces of sausage and garlic up and pop them into the Dutch oven. Stir in the oregano and rosemary as well.

Deglaze the skillet with the red wine, and add the wine and any pieces of sausage that are in it to the Dutch oven. Stir in half of the anchovies.

Simmer the sauce for 10 minutes, partially covered, and taste. Add more anchovies as needed. (I just threw them all in.) Cook for 30 minutes more, stirring occasionally. Cover the pot and/or add a little more wine if the sauce starts to get too thick.

Serve with spaghetti and grated cheese. Serves 4.

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My little Rhubarb is well named. She wanted to nibble on the rhubarb leaves I brought into the house. I made her settle for toying with a "mouse" made of the stalk.

Susan Shauger, who sings in our church choir, brought a rhubarb cobbler to the church’s recent Meal without Plastic. It was a huge hit.

Of course, I asked for the recipe. Susan explained that she couldn’t find the exact one she used, which was from a vintage cookbook. But … it went something like this!

I have mentioned before on these pages that I adore rhubarb. I have a feeling I’ll be making Susan’s cobbler a lot in rhubarb seasons to come. It’s easy, and the tangy rhubarb flavor sings happily under the biscuit crust. I served it to friends last weekend with homemade vanilla ice cream.

Begin by making the base. Combine the sugar and cornstarch in a smallish nonreactive pot. Stir in the rhubarb and lemon juice. Cover this mixture and let it sit for an hour or two until the rhubarb juices up.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Butter a 1-1/2 quart casserole dish.

Uncover the rhubarb mixture and bring it to a boil, stirring occasionally. Boil, stirring gently, for 1 minute. Remove the fruit from the heat and stir in the cinnamon.

Spread the rhubarb mixture in the prepared pan. Dot the top with butter.

To make the crust whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Cut in the butter, but don’t overdo the process. You should still have tiny pieces of butter in the mixture.

Whisk together the milk and egg. Add them to the dry ingredients, and mix just until moist. Drop this mixture onto the rhubarb mixture, and spread it around to cover the fruit. Sprinkle brown sugar over all in little clumps.

Bake until lightly browned, 20 to 25 minutes. Serves 8.

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